Books like Ties That Bind by Tiya Miles

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, exploring the lives of black women in the South and their experiences of abuse and struggle for independence.

Cora, a woman enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, partners with a new slave named Caesar to flee the South. Their daring escape follows a literal underground network of tunnels that mirrors the perilous journey of countless fugitive slaves toward freedom.

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Alex Haley’s Pulitzer‑winning saga follows Kunta Kinte from his capture in Africa through centuries of slavery and generations of his descendants, revealing the deep roots of African‑American history.

Celestial and Roy, a young couple embodying the American Dream, are torn apart when Roy is wrongfully convicted and sent to prison. Five years later, his conviction is overturned, forcing Celestial to confront the fractured life she must rebuild.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a non‑fiction study of the Great Migration, tracing the journey of nearly six million African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970.

A chilling memoir detailing Solomon Northup's harrowing experience as a captive on a Louisiana plantation for twelve years, from 1841 to 1853.

A young white woman's journey into a black community to study the family support systems coping with poverty, debunking the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized.

Tally's Corner examines the lived reality of the urban poor in Washington, D.C., challenging the culture of poverty thesis and exploring how the absence of black men, economic shifts, and social conditions shape African American community life.

In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.

A collection of stories of barrier-breaking pioneers in various fields, celebrating the triumphs of those who overcame adversity.

"The unexpected story of how genetic testing is affecting race in America, "--NoveList.